Transport gap and hysteretic behavior of the Ising quantum Hall ferromagnets in Landau levels $\left|N\right|>0$ of bilayer graphene

Abstract

The chiral two-dimensional electron gas in Landau levels $\left|N\right|>0$ of a Bernal-stacked graphene bilayer has a valley-pseudospin Ising quantum Hall ferromagnetic behavior at odd filling factors ${\nu }_N=1,3$ of these fourfold degenerate states. At zero interlayer electrical bias, the ground state at these fillings is spin polarized and electrons occupy one valley or the other while a finite electrical bias produces a series of valley pseudospin-flip transitions. In this work, we extend the Ising behavior to chirally-stacked multilayer graphene and discuss the hysteretic behavior of the Ising quantum Hall ferromagnets. We compute the transport gap due to different excitations: bulk electron-hole pairs, electron-hole pairs confined to the coherent region of a valley-pseudospin domain wall, and spin or valley-pseudospin skyrmion-antiskyrmion pairs. We determine which of these excitations has the lowest energy at a given value of the Zeeman coupling, bias, and magnetic field.

18 pages with 9 eps figures

References in corpus (7)

• The electronic properties of graphene
• The electronic properties of bilayer graphene
• Topological confinement in bilayer graphene
• Band Structure of ABC-Stacked Graphene Trilayers
• Spontaneous Layer-Pseudospin Domain Walls in Bilayer Graphene
• Valley-kink in Bilayer Graphene at $\nu =0$: A Charge Density Signature for Quantum Hall Ferromagnetism
• Ising quantum Hall ferromagnetism in Landau levels $\left|N\right|\ge 1$ of bilayer graphene

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Spontaneous Layer Polarization and Conducting Domain Walls in the Quantum Hall Regime of Bilayer Graphene
• Phase transitions and topological properties of the 5/2 quantum Hall states with strong Landau-level mixing
• Skyrmionic Transport and First Order Phase Transitions in Twisted Bilayer Graphene Quantum Hall Ferromagnet